Accountability demands may be increasingly placed on educational and other institutions. However, many proposals for monitoring quality education brought forward by legislative bodies and/or others across the country may not provide a true indicator of quality. For example, a first year retention rate, which is often a factor in the quality education discussion, does not necessarily tell much about the genuine quality of the learning that takes place at an institution. Nonetheless, indicators such as retention rates, graduation rates, student-to-faculty ratios and percentage of alumni giving have emerged as measures of higher education performance for many reasons, including the fact that the data can be readily gathered and merged into statistical equations that result in quality rankings and funding formula calculations. The result of some such calculations may distort assessment of educational quality.